Posts Tagged Community Safety

When I was little, there was a game we would play quite often, called The Nonsense Game. We would sit in a small circle and the person to my left would whisper a simple question to my ear, and I would reply. I would then ask something else to the person on my right, and put together the answer I got from my right and the question on my left, coming up with… well, nonsense. Hence the name. The result would be things like: On my left I was asked ‘What is your favorite color?’ And my right replied ‘Fly’, or ‘What do you dream of doing? Yellow’. Hope you get the idea.

Lately, an increasing amount of news on issues related to security bring that game to mind. Here’s a few examples:

1)      In the summer of 2009, a major Spanish newspaper published pictures of tourists and sex workers having sex in the area around a central market in Barcelona, La Boqueria. Just a few days ago, the Town Hall implemented its solution to that problem: putting up a fence around the area, so that only neighbors can access it during the night.

On my left I was asked ‘What to do with prostitution in public places?’, and my right replied ‘fence-in a whole area of the city’.

2)      In recent years, many cities have installed CCTV in streets and squares around commercial areas, as a way to deter petty crime and reduce anti-social behavior. The fact that we have no clear evidence to conclude that videosurveillance is useful to prevent incivility or reduce petty crime seems irrelevant.

On my left I was asked ‘How to improve community safety in city centres’, and my right replied ‘turning everyone into a suspect and the object of permanent remote surveillance’.

3)      Just a year ago, a guy who had been reported by his father due to his links with Al-Qaeda tried to explode a bomb inside a plane Amsterdam-Detroit –luckily, he only managed to set his underwear on fire. A few days later, the media reported what the solution to that problem was: full-body scanners. The fact that it was unclear whether such devices would have identified what the man was carrying seemed irrelevant.

On my left I was asked ‘How to make sure people who have been reported for links with terrorist organizations never board a plane’, and my right replied ‘By making everyone go through full-body scanners’.

The gap between security and safety problems and solutions is frightening. Faced with problems of public health and human trafficking, the break-up of social ties and inequality, of police inefficiency or lack of resources for intelligence operations, etc. the solutions we adopt invariably respond more to a generalized technophilia and the need to make it look like political representatives are ‘doing something’ than to anything having to do with real efficiency and problem-solving. And while the massive expenditure of public money on devices and ‘things’ that have yet to prove they actually address any of the real problems is worrying, what unsettles and upsets me is that, in each and every case, the solutions to security problems include measures and policies that affect everyone: public spaces are fenced-in for everyone of us, regardless of whether we have taken part in any exchange of sexual services. CCTV monitors and controls us all, irrespective of our criminal record or intention to commit an illegal or anti-social act. Full-body scanners invade the privacy of all of us, even if we would never dream of causing damage to innocent people.

In this drive to feel safe, we are not only sacrificing liberty, but also fundamental rights and values such as the right to privacy, the presumption of innocence (the idea that one is innocent until proven guilty) and legal certainty.

At this rate, by the time any of the ‘enemy civilizations that threaten our way of life’ invade us, there will be little left of the rights and values we pretend to defend and care so much about. All we’ll have left will be nonsense.